From Jesse Gamboa on TikTok:
Let’s hike up Wisdom Mountain to our internet gurus:
- Journalist Brian Beutler is interviewed in podcast by Greg Sargent for The New Republic. Brian reviews reports of Trump’s dark rage toward those he regards as “traitors”, his darker plans for 2025, and suggests that Democrats still can do more than is generally recognized to thwart what poses the greatest danger to our system of freedom, and what they must do to alert the public.
Those of us in environments more easily lending themselves to reading than listening may want to go to transcript.
- News Corpse reviews Trump’s interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he reveals his plan to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists and jail the January 6th Committee.
- Kristen Welker is the newest host at NBC’s Meet the Press.
driftglass offers a brief sampling of the Kristen Welker interview technique with Trump. driftglass is notably unimpressed.
Key verdict:
NBC hired themselves another Chuck Todd…good at the job that NBC hired her to do: sit in that chair and perform an empty Beltway ritual which might, when glanced for a moment from a great distance through very dirty glasses, be mistaken for journalism. - Tommy Christopher has the video as a C-SPAN interviewer briefly destroys a Republican defense of Pete Hegseth: that he is the victim of an anonymous rape allegation.
Key identifier:
…he paid a settlement. So he does know who it is. - Frances Langum shows one of a multitude of videos of just one of many Trump nominees with ultra-strange ideas. Monica Crowley defends Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism in a time‑trip to the 1950s.
Key warning:
Did you know that “kooks” in the Democratic Party have taken our nation on a “socialist joyride”? Monica warned you! - Ant Farmer’s Almanac has Greece sending an unorthodox response to rumors of Trump’s appointment of Kimberly Guilfoyle’s as US Ambassador.
(Yeah, yeah. I know it’s satire. Sheesh!) - Amid all the danger, criminality, and corruption, we see an additional ticky case of tacky as Juanita Jean brings us the latest marketing effort by Trump. He sells his Fight! Fight! Fight! perfume with a photo of himself and Jill Biden, without her permission.
- tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors looks at polls on basic constitutional fairness and ends up losing any remaining confidence in the Republican part of the American population.
- The killer of a health care insurance CEO is becoming a bit of a folk hero in some quarters. Vixen Strangely takes a contrary view.
- The Journal of Improbable Research provides more detail of what is finally becoming a larger health care debate in the recent experiment by a health care insurer (Okay, okay, so it was Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield) in applying a time limit for the anesthesia services they will cover during surgery. For some mysterious reason, the experiment failed.
- At The Moderate Voice, editor Joe Gandelman sees an American trend:
It can’t happen here
going to
It has happened here, so what?
and now heading toward
We won’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone.Joe looks to a history of past threats and sees a glimmer of hope.
Key danger (quoting Martin Longman):
The American people just don’t seem to be in a mood to uphold much of anything, whether its norms against murder in the streets, the independence of the Justice Department, disqualifying politicians who commit business fraud, rape, and coup attempts, or the importance of upholding the Constitution. -
Songwriter, satirist, and mathematician Tom Lehrer once described 1965:
It has been a nervous year
And people have begun to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitisCalicoJack in The Psy of Life defines what we are going through with the election of Trump as profound ontological shock and, at this point, offers a bit of helpful empathy.
We’re in this together. - After we make our unfortunate Presidential choice, North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has the provisional verdict on America: We all make mistakes.
- Nan’s Notebook poses a fantasy question to those who don’t much care for President‑to‑be Trump. If you were to move out of the US, what destination would you choose?
Clarifying headline:
Let’s Pretend! - Elon Musk embraces a vision:
Just Elon Musk sharing an AI image of the New York Times engulfed in flame as a white nationalist Pepe mascot celebrates newfound influence.
— Tim Dickinson (@timdickinson.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 1:01 PM
Julian Sanchez has the best reaction.
Julian revives an old phrase:
Apropos of, a somewhat old-timey expression we need to revive is “low cunning”, which captures Trump’s canny instinct for manipulation untainted by anything resembling actual intellect.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) December 9, 2024 at 12:55 PM
- Scotties Playtime has the links. Witnesses watch the uncomfortable meeting as Congressional Representative Nancy Mace encounters a foster youth advocate who asks her to reconsider her attacks on trans people, especially kids. They do shake hands, and the visit ends with a sort of icy cordiality.
Cordial, that is, until Nancy later appears with arm in sling. She tells police the chance meeting was actually a brutal assault and has the children’s advocate arrested.
Key judgment:
She never grew up, she is still a high school girl chasing fame on social media. - For years, Alex Jones had profitable fun defaming grieving parents of murdered children after an early school shooting (So, so many since). So the families sued over that defamation and won.
After his loss in court, his website is sold at auction to The Onion, the proceeds to contribute to pay for damages to the families.
A judge overturns the auction on a logically weird technicality.
The Onion covers the joyful reaction to the news from Global Tetrahedron, an organization dedicated to a world in which wealth begets wealth, power begets power, and the process itself inflicts daily suffering on innocent parties for no reason.
Key elation from the CEO (Oh stop lecturing. I know it’s satire):
…a dream come true for the 10-year-old boy in me who grew up idolizing greats like George Wallace and Idi Amin. - In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson provides a day‑by‑day account, and aftermath reactions, as the Bashar al‑Assad regime melts into nothingness and Putin’s military retreats.
Key response in Syria:
In Damascus, crowds are praying and celebrating, and opposition forces have liberated the prisoners held in the notorious Saydnaya military prison.Key response from the White House:
Speaking to the nation this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced: “At long last, the Assad regime has fallen. This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians.”Key reaction from President-to-be Trump
In contrast to Biden’s comments, President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts took Russia’s side in the Syrian events. Noting that the insurgents looked as if they would throw Assad out, Trump’s account said that “Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years.” The account blamed former president Barack Obama for the crisis of 2011 and said that Russia had stepped in then to stop the chaos.The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit sees Putin’s representatives desperately researching the insurgency taking over Syria, as Putin tries to determine who he can beg to retrieve Russian bases.
- Infidel753 looks at how the Russian military is faring in a kleptocracy and claims, with logic and evidence, that Putin’s empire is ready to collapse.
Fair enough.Then Assad’s military in Syria collapses from some of the same causes, and a weakened Putin has to retreat: all providing additional reasons Putin has cause to worry.
A military depending on authoritarian support tends to get hollowed out by corruption.
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger analyzes the analyses on whether whatever regime is formed in Syria will be better than the tyrant that has been driven out.
- Birthright citizenship is an automatic right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group go to podcast, getting into the history of that basic right, and Trumpian promises to end it by Executive Order. Will the current renegade Supreme Court help him succeed?
- Iron Knee at Political Irony considers voters for whom winning only means those they consider enemies are losing.
- At least our cousins across the pond argue about things that matter.
M. Bouffant at Web of Evil covers the latest social conflict in Britain: the Tory War on the Sandwich.
Key controversy:
Britain’s Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch kicked off a heated political debate about a lunchtime favorite Thursday after declaring that sandwiches are not “a real food.” - I hope libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara will forgive me if he ever reads this and thinks I misstate his position.
Michael hates the very idea of government action to mitigate climate change.
He argues, variously, that:
Climate is not changing
or
It isn’t changing all that much
or
What change there might be is not caused by human action
or
To the extent that it is caused by humans, there is nothing that government can do about it
AND most of all:
It’s all a plot by evil socialists to impose a Stalinesque rule over the world.It can be uncomfortable to come across a hopelessly inept argument in your favor.
So I can empathize a little as poor Michael comes across Dennis Manning.Dennis argues that any government action to prevent environmental damage due to rising sea levels is unconstitutional.
After all,
Defense of the nation is not the same as protecting property. That is not the government’s role.Michael isn’t having it. He agrees that trying to slow climate change is verboten, but dammit, not with THAT argument!!
Waddya mean the common defense doesn’t include property???
It sure as hell DOESKey constitutional:
And what exactly does “the common defense” (“defense of the nation”) mean, if not protecting the rights of its citizens, including their private property?At least some of us have stumbled across similar occasions, as someone from our own side presents intolerable reasoning.
Long, long ago, a friend told me Richard Nixon couldn’t be trusted:
His eyes are too close.From too many decades back, I remember with great affection sharing with my father an argument in favor of abortion rights.
Ted Turner (Remember Ted?) boasted that he got the best of Jerry Falwell. (Remember Jerry?)
Ted insisted to Jerry that he could prove human life does not begin at conception.
Jerry was skeptical. How did Ted propose any such proof?
Well…
After an abortion or miscarriage, nobody has ever held a funeral for the fetus.
Right?
Well…Right?Later Ted, gloated over his victory: Jerry had no response. He just stared.
Said my Dad, laughing:
Yeah, speechless. I can picture his mouth hanging open. - In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce takes a look at abortion, proposing a compelling analogy in favor of bodily autonomy.
I, of course, made a comment.
- Right Wing Watch brings us the video as an activist who finances extreme religious-right personalities joins with far-right pastor Paul Blair in dismissing climate temperature records as just total nonsense,
The argument seems to be that record breaking temperatures are meaningless because there were years during the last century in which past records were not broken.
So that settles it, right? Arcs count, zig-zagging dangers don’t.
Right Wing Watch provides a chart of annual temperatures as measured by scientists including the dismissed century:
- Laura High says a Bible centered education will protect the purity of our children. Or maybe not:
- PZ Myers casts his eyes, and ours, on a religious advocate who attacks atheism without understanding what it is and isn’t.
- The great Sarah Cooper complains that political correctness has ruined company Christmas parties:
- From The Borowitz Report: the reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral is marred by the appearance of the Antichrist
Key additional disturbance:
He later disrupted the ceremony by loudly hawking a shipment of $60 Bibles he had just received from China. - In Happiness Between Tails da-AL gets help from husband Khashayar Parsi with a wonderful step‑by‑step recipe for California cucumber avocado soup and a short, insightful poem by guest blogger Anushka Argawal about struggling for a positive outlook.
- The Register goes to the pun machine as the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation admits to a hole in their security.
Key subheadline:
Belly-busting biz says it’s been hit by cowardly custardsActually, this is not a gag (See what I did there?) They really were hacked.
- Some things shouldn’t have to be spelled out.
Clickbait satirist Reductress explains why, when at a restaurant with friends, it’s rude to be on your phone, unless you need to google stuff.
Well… DUH!
- Dave Columbo knows why those of us who occasionally travel sometimes don’t look forward to the air journey
- @whiskeywhistle98 is really good at a couple of things
- SilverAppleQueen has cats who carefully regard a Christmas tree.
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